International team of ecologists, including Vojtech Novotny from the Biology Center of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of South Bohemia, together with researchers from the University of Minnesota, the Smithsonian Institution and the Guelph University, has shown that in addition to the extraordinary diversity of species in the tropics, there is also another, invisible layer of biodiversity manifested by genetic differences among different populations of the same species.
Their analysis of cytochrome-oxidase I gene (commonly used for the description of species diversity, known as barcoding) in moth species living on 75,000 square kilometers of lowland rainforest in New Guinea found that only about a quarter of all moth species were genetically homogeneous over this study area. Approximately 15% of species were genetically differentiated according to where they lived, while other 20% of species were differentiated accoding to their host plant species. Finally, 20% species differentiated both according to geography and host plant species, while the remaining fifth of species required further study.
These differences suggest that speciation can be promoted by both geographic isolation and host plant specialization among different populations, but that the importance of these processes varies among different species of moths.
The study was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Craft, K. J., Pauls, S. U., Darrow, K., Miller, S. E., Hebert, P. N. D., Helgen, L., Novotny, V., and Weiblen, G. D. (2010) Population genetic differentiation of New Guinea lowland rainforest Lepidoptera. PNAS 107, 5041-5046.
See the article on: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/01/0913084107.full.pdf+html
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Biology Centre of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, v. v. i. |
